Gladstone’s Melanie Ott and Alex Marson Elected to the National Academy of Medicine
Physician-scientists and directors at Gladstone Institutes, Ott and Marson are honored for their pioneering achievements in science and medicine.
Center for PhAIge Therapy
Every year, about 5 million deaths around the world are associated with bacterial infections that stop responding to antibiotics.
The Center for PhAIge Therapy combines engineering and artificial intelligence to leverage the potential of phages—viruses that naturally infect and kill bacteria—as new treatment options for these drug-resistant infections.
Despite promising results in individual patients, phage therapy has remained difficult to use at a larger scale. The new research center will build the preclinical tools and models needed to overcome this obstacle and make phages a more reliable treatment for infections.
Gladstone scientists have already built AI to predict which phages work against a given bacterial strain, but those models need far more data to be accurate. In this center, the researchers are generating an unprecedented amount of data to train the models by using engineered phages and bacteria to better understand, step by step, how bacteria are killed.
The Center for PhAIge Therapy has four main areas of focus:
- Measure how individual parts of phages contribute to their activity against bacteria by building on Gladstone’s phage-genome editing technology, to guide the design of more effective phages.
- Characterize how bacterial strains vary in their susceptibility to phages, to identify phage combinations most likely to work against specific strains.
- Develop new algorithms to predict the compatibility of phage-bacteria pairs and optimize natural phages into drugs.
- Study how the body’s environment impacts phage behavior and treatment outcomes through the use of human lung organoids.
The center was launched in 2026 through an initial award of $2 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), with additional funding of up to a total of $10 million available over the proposed 5-year project period. Gladstone is one of three institutions across the country selected to host the new Centers for Accelerating Phage Therapy to Combat ESKAPE Pathogens (CAPT-CEP) to advance the therapeutic use of phages.
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